The Author’s Hand

Jon gets it right, I think, when he writes that “The Imperfectionists,” is less a novel than a book of short stories, “united in setting, with some crossover characters, but composed of freestanding short narratives.” The characters in the book, though often finely wrought (I’m thinking especially of Lloyd Burko, Arthur Gopal, and Herman Cohen), are never given, as in a novel, much space to breathe, to develop and change, or to surprise and confound. It would be wrong to call them stock characters—many blaze into the narrative as unique and compelling personalities. But they never seem to move the plot or shape the story; Rachman’s deft hand is always present. It might be that everything, and everyone, serves a larger character, which is the newspaper. Or it might be that there is a still-larger character to serve: the book’s clever structure itself—with its drolly-titled sections, its series of chapter-ending kickers and reveals, and its general, all-consuming serio-comic inertia. At their broadest, the characters are representations—of type-A workaholism (Kathleen Solson), of office insecurity that edges close to madness (Ruby Zaga), of youth’s innocence scuttled (Winston Cheung). The characters take engaging flights, but the wires suspending them in midair often show.

Rachman’s manipulations are most apparent in the chapter/story, “Markets Crash over Fears of China Slowdown,” about Abbey Pinnola, the newspaper’s chief financial officer, known to her colleagues on the editorial side of the paper by the degrading nickname, “Accounts Payable.” On a plane from Rome to Atlanta, she ends up sitting next to one of those colleagues—the seemingly, but of course not really, bland Dave Belling. In just twenty pages, this narrative goes from a meditation on the awkward companionship engendered by air travel, to a Neil LaBute-esque sexual revenge fantasy, ending with the book’s most thrilling and preposterous shocker (I had it as “devastating and ridiculous” in the margins of the page). It’s a great story, and deftly written, much of it in Pinnola’s manic inner-voice. In the airplane bathroom, she thinks about a possible liaison with Belling:

“For the next few days, she’s got a four-star hotel room in Atlanta. She gets a tingle. Forget it, you freak. But it would be nice to hang out a bit. Talk. He’s cute, no? Surprisingly. Totally natural. Nice to have a bit of company. A proper grown-up. Having a man around again…”

Yet even the passage above, which seems to make human the supposed bean counter, instead is overdrawn, in big, brash strokes. She’s these things, it says: neurotic, a little desperate, insecure, obtuse. Though the story seems to be about people, it’s really about ideas, familiar throughout the book, which the characters also exist to serve. The ideas themselves are valuable: That working in an office is often dehumanizing; that you never know your co-workers and the dark recesses to which their minds might travel; and more practically and perhaps most insightful, that the division between business and editorial departments in newspapers and magazines is foolishly, maybe dangerously rigid, leaving both sides suspicious and dismissive of the other. It’s no small feat that the author gets so much out of this section’s final few lines. Such dexterity, evident from Rachman throughout this book, might be what Christopher Buckley was referring to when he wrote in his review of “The Imperfectionists”: “I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off.” After my second reading, Rachman stood out as the star, with his characters relegated to playing the supporting roles.

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